The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University seeks fellows for year-long residential fellowships who are conducting interdisciplinary research projects exploring the literary, historical, ethical, and political registers of survival.
We invite humanistic engagement on what it means to live in moments that are marked by precarity, fragility, and catastrophe. What might it mean to flourish in a world on the brink of extinction or exhaustion? Survival can be individual or collective, shaped by cultural imperatives, ideological commitments, or existential negotiations in the face of political, economic, environmental, social, and technological upheavals. Under these conditions, survival is more than living: survival can be a form of living on, a form of sustenance. We ask: what practices and imaginaries survive as individuals, movements, or species confront erasure? How does sudden or slow violence produce ways of surviving? Is refusal, dissent, resilience, or renewal sufficient to counter destructive forces?
We draw inspiration from ideas about “survivance,” and ask what it means to endure and transform amid the catastrophes (past and present) that challenge our existence. As Audre Lorde asks, what does it mean to craft a good life in a world structured so that some were never meant to survive? Have our visions of the good life become sources of cruel optimism, to follow Lauren Berlant?
In posing these questions, we invite humanistic research that engages or critiques the idea of survival. From environmental challenges (hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, famine, and rising sea levels) to political landscapes (wars, military action, regime change), we invite research that considers survival through questions of poetics, aesthetics, ethics, history, or biopolitics. Could we rethink the literary, material, psychic, and symbolic survival of the past? Is one avenue for survival to embrace the fugitive possibilities of living on amongst the ruins? We welcome projects that collectively press us to confront the survival of care, creativity, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge.
The Society for the Humanities welcomes applications from scholars and artists who are interested in participating in a productive, critical dialogue concerning the theme of Survival from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
Image: Coral Confection, Lauren Kussro, www.laurenkussro.com.
2026-27 Survival Competitions
- Society Fellowships: One-year residential fellowships at Cornell University with a $64,000 stipend. Application deadline: September 22,2025
- Faculty Fellowships: Open to Cornell faculty members only, one-year residential fellowships located at the A.D. White House. Application deadline: October 31, 2025.
- Mellon Graduate Fellowships: Open to Cornell graduate students only, nine-month residential fellowships located at the A.D. White House, includes a $35,661 stipend, tuition, and student health insurance. Application deadline: October 31, 2025.
